The non-profit Foundation Grez-sur-Loing's mission is twofold: to manage its guesthouse, Hôtel Chevillon, and to be an enabler for those seeking a creative oasis. Our main mission is to promote development in art, literature, and science to the best of our ability. We can offer a sanctuary for creation. For work. Here, the outside world shall not disturb.

The environment in and around Hôtel Chevillon is tranquil, inspiring, and stimulating to the imagination. Here, one can find peace and quiet. In the guesthouse on Rue Wilson in Grez-sur-Loing, just southeast of Paris, a unique place is offered where creativity and inspiration unite, today just as they did 150 years ago. Back then, among others, Carl Larsson, Karin Bergöö, Robert Louis Stevenson, Julia Beck, Emma Löwstädt-Chadwick, and August Strindberg resided in the hotel. Today, the guests represent a palette of various creative professions: artists, writers, researchers, journalists, doctoral candidates, and photographers. The list of renowned artists from both past and present could be extensive.

The Grez-sur-Loing Foundation does not award its own scholarships. Some guests have applied for specific residency grants tied to Hôtel Chevillon through other scholarship organizations. However, many seek residency grants independently and cover their own expenses.

What we do

About the Foundation

It all began in 1987 when the famous, yet dilapidated property Hôtel Chevillon in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, barely seventy miles southeast of Paris, went up for sale. A group of art enthusiasts from Gothenburg took the initiative to establish a foundation, which in turn purchased the property. The hotel has been known since the late 19th century when an international artists' colony with artists from Scotland, England, the USA, and Japan lived and worked here. They were followed by a large number of Nordic artists such as Karl Nordström, Carl and Karin Larsson, August Strindberg, Bruno Liljefors, Julia Beck, Eva Bonnier, Christian Skredsvig, Christian Krohg, P S Krøyer…

For several years, the hotel building, Carl Larsson's studio, and the garden were renovated. A new studio was built. Determined efforts were made for Hôtel Chevillon to regain the atmosphere of artistic creation that characterized the guesthouse a hundred years earlier. On March 16, 1994, Hôtel Chevillon was reopened. Sweden's Queen Silvia and the then Minister of Culture Birgit Friggebo attended, along with representatives from Swedish and French cultural and business sectors.

But the Foundation's history actually began on January 4, 1986. Bo E Åkermark, correspondent for Dagens Nyheter in Paris, wrote an article about the dilapidated Hôtel Chevillon. He saw the potential in both the environment and the hotel. The house is for sale, wrote Åkermark, and "it is possible to buy it, whoever wishes, to establish a foundation in their own or Strindberg's or Carl Larsson's or anyone else's name and rent out the place as guest studios." The DN journalist's indirect call enticed the people of Gothenburg to Grez-sur-Loing, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Hôtel Chevillon is not only a historically significant place for Swedish art history, where, for example, Carl Larsson began to work in watercolor and where he met his future wife, Karin. Even today, there is ongoing international creative work and exchange here between scholarship holders from a dozen scholarship organizations and self-funded guests who live in the apartments, work in the studios, and socialize in the lounges.